“From Google Docs to 3D Graphics, NVIDIA Wants To Power All Your Applications with Omniverse.”
As the world embraces digital transition, there are hardly any processes in any industry that are not touched by software. Today, we have software that writes software. Software that simulates the real world so that the creators don’t have to expend resources on failed or narrow ideas. At the cusp of this simulated reality, NVIDIA wants to extend their services so that everything from skyscrapers to sports cars and smart cities will be designed and tested in simulation.
At the ongoing GTC 2020 event, NVIDIA revealed the details of its most ambitious venture yet — Omniverse.
Millions of designers, architects and other creators will soon be able to collaborate in real-time, whether on-premises or remotely, with the NVIDIA Omniverse platform, which NVIDIA announced has entered open beta.
Omniverse is designed to provide efficient real-time scene updates and is based on open standards and protocols; to act as a hub for enabling new capabilities to be exposed as micro-services to any connected clients and applications.
Creators, Assemble!
With Omniverse NVIDIA brings together breakthroughs in graphics, simulation and AI, Omniverse is the world’s first NVIDIA RTX-based 3D simulation and collaboration platform that fuses the physical and virtual worlds to simulate reality in real-time and with photorealistic detail.
Companies such as Autodesk and Bentley Systems are already exploring what USD can do for this community.
For Architects
Architects need a way to quickly review progress on construction projects with owners and real-estate developers. Each stakeholder wants different programs often running on different computers, tablets or even handsets. This is where the Omniverse can come in handy. It offers services like
- real-time path tracing,
- developing surrounding context,
- interactive design review with clients and
- augmented reality design review with Cloud XR
“Universal Scene Description(USD) helped Hollywood designers collaborate. Now it’s playing similar roles for architects, product designers and more.”
For Manufacturing industry
Manufacturing companies deal with thousands of complex components that need to be quickly designed and tested, ranging from smartwatches to autonomous trucks.
This exhaustive process requires iterations and runs through the hands of many kinds of specialists who demand photorealistic 3D models. Omniverse explores the possibilities like putting visualisations in the hands of online customers.
For instance, thanks to USD in Omniverse, NVIDIA could make a video demonstrating the NVIDIA DGX A100 system that has exploding views of how its 30,000 components snap into a million drill holes.
For Autonomous Industry
Omniverse can help engineers model cars and even the details of a highway. The simulation details are good enough to test both vehicles and their automated driving capabilities. For instance, robot car consumers can leverage Omniverse simulation before building or buying a physical robot.
For Gaming and Movies
Hollywood studios have already adopted USD. Omniverse incorporates the power of NVIDIA RTX real-time ray-tracing graphics into USD’s collaborative, layered editing. For example, Epic’s Unreal Engine supports USD. Unity and Blender support it as well. Whereas, Adobe’s developers were among many others who welcomed USD and used it for their products. “USD has a whole world of features that are incredibly powerful,” said Davide Pesare, who worked on USD at Pixar and is now a senior R&D manager at Adobe.
Pixar even produced one of their blockbusters, Finding Dory, using USD. Dreamworks, as well as Disney, have blended USD into its pipeline for animated features, too.
So, what gives NVIDIA the confidence to venture into this vibrant ecosystem and play the part of a hub that pushes the envelopes of creativity? NVIDIA is again relying on something they are the best at doing — building GPUs.
“Second-gen RT Cores add hardware acceleration for ray-traced motion blur rendering, delivering up to 7x faster performance than the last generation.“
At GTC, NVIDIA also introduced a flagship GPU for creators — the NVIDIA RTX A6000. The new GPU also supports graphics workloads at scale for remote users, enabling larger creative workflows and making it perfect for working from home.
Built on the new NVIDIA Ampere architecture, the RTX A6000 GPU, allows creators to complete complex creative tasks in real-time and animate extra-large 3D models. It also offers the largest memory available in a single GPU and is expandable to 96GB using NVLink to connect two GPUs.
